My fave paper, The Daily Telegraph, has a story from the continent about bees.
Apparently it is all the rage in the Reich [wait, do they still call Germany the Reich? And if so, what are we up to, R 4, R 5? Help me Germophiles] to thief bee colonies. Bee theft has outstripped the lifting of TVs and cars in some parts of nation with an 85 per cent spike in hive thefts this year over last.
Whodda thunk it.
For example the Apicultural State Institute in Stuttgart has had 72 colonies stolen over the last few years.
To defeat this rash of bee theft bee keepers are dropping Global Positioning Units into their hives to make it easy for five oh to catch a thief.
WFDS
Since "the unified Germany which arose under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck in 1871 was the first entity that was officially called in German Deutsches Reich." and "the different political systems [known as Reich's are] more commonly referred to in English as: "the German Empire" (1871–1918), the Weimar Republic (1919–1933), and Nazi Germany (the Third Reich) (1933–1945)." (source: wikipedia)
ReplyDeleteI would say that we are at four, since Reich in the past was only used of a unified Germany. The reunified Germany (1990-to present) on the other hand is still technically known as the Federal Republic, so one could say that the fourth Reich started in 1949 when Germany was split.
The comment above is way off. It completely misses the historical significance of the whole issue of Reich. The first Reich was the Holy Roman Empire, the second Reich was the 1871-1918 monarchy and the third Reich was Nazi Germany from 1933-1945. I think we're on R4.2 now, lol.
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